Glass alabastron (perfume bottle)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translucent blue, with handles in same color; trails in opaque yellow and opaque turquoise blue. Flat rim-disk, slanting slightly to one side; short cylindrical neck; small sloping shoulder; straight-sided cylindrical body, with upward taper; uneven convex bottom; on body at different heights, two lug handles, applied over trail pattern; one with trailing tail upwards across body. A yellow trail applied as a blob at top of body and another trail in turquoise added below, and both trailed down in a spiral and tooled into a close-set zigzag pattern with shallow vertical ribbing, ending in a spiral around edge of bottom. Complete, but cracked around middle of body; dulling, some pitting, and iridescent brownish weathering.

Greek and Roman Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Museum's collection of Greek and Roman art comprises more than thirty thousand works ranging in date from the Neolithic period (ca. 4500 B.C.) to the time of the Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in A.D. 312. It includes the art of many cultures and is among the most comprehensive in North America. The geographic regions represented are Greece and Italy, but not as delimited by modern political frontiers: Greek colonies were established around the Mediterranean basin and on the shores of the Black Sea, and Cyprus became increasingly Hellenized. For Roman art, the geographical limits coincide with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The department also exhibits the art of prehistoric Greece (Helladic, Cycladic, and Minoan) and pre-Roman art of Italic peoples, notably the Etruscans.

Metropolitan Museum of Art